1 Peter 4:17

For the time is come that judgment must begin Literally, It is the season of the beginning of the judgment. The words of the Apostle stand in close connexion with his belief that he was living in the last age of the world, that "the end of all things was at hand." (See note on 1 Peter 4:7.) He saw in the persecutions and sufferings that fell on the Church, beginning "from the house of God," the opening of that judgment. It was not necessarily a work of condemnation. Those on whom it fell might be judged in order that they might not be condemned (comp. 1 Corinthians 11:32). But it was a time which, like the final judgment, was one of separation. It was trying the reality of the faith of those who professed to believe in Christ, and dividing the true disciples from the hypocrites and half-hearted. The "house of God" is His family, His Ecclesia, as in 1 Timothy 3:15, and the "spiritual house" of chap. 1 Peter 2:5.

what shall the end be of them that obey not The à fortioriargument reminds us in some measure of that of St Paul, "If God spared not the natural branches, take heed lest He also spare not thee" (Romans 11:21). There, however, the contrast lay between Israel after the flesh that was rejected for its unfaithfulness and the new Israel after the spirit if it too should prove unfaithful. Here it lies between the true Israel of God and the outlying heathen world. With a question which is more awful than any assertion, he asks, as to those that obey not, What shall be their end? The thought was natural enough to have been quite spontaneous, but it may also have been the echo of like thoughts that had passed through the minds of the older prophets. "I begin to bring evil upon the city which is called by my Name, and shall ye" the nations of the heathen "be utterly unpunished?" Jeremiah 25:29. Comp. also Jeremiah 49:12; Ezekiel 9:6.